When I had just joined SecPod, I had this question lingering in my mind as to what it meant to be working here. But now, I feel I can take the privilege to answer it after having worked over here for over 8 years. SecPod, an organization where our creative desires are satisfied to the fullest, where each employee knows the other personally, where we share strong equations with each individual and cherish our relationships, where we create base for strong human connections.
The culture of the organization is such, where you are encouraged to speak your mind irrespective of how long you have been here, argue with each other and at the same time respect each other’s opinion. All of us are very different and carry unique perspectives on every topic, work or otherwise. This place encourages us to follow our unique style of working without being micromanaged.
My Journey So Far….
When I started here around 8 years back, what caught my attention was a bunch of passionate people who upheld strong human values and wanted to do some great work.
Audacious Goals
In the past 8 years, I have seen us move leaps and bounds, setting bold expectations and working hard to deliver the same. Every time we planned on doing something new, the targets looked very audacious and I used to wonder if it is achievable. Working here has also taught me what looks audacious in the beginning becomes achievable once we have taken a few baby steps in the direction and we almost always ended up meeting those expectations and beyond.
Looking back at the work that has been done, I can very well recall one of the instances when we decided we were going to provide remediation through our product, Saner. We had been covering only detection till then and suddenly, the thought of trying to patch the issues and without any user intervention looked like a very big challenge. Patching is a hard problem, which means really making changes to organization’s devices. But in a few months, our product was patching quite a long list of products. But I can clearly recall how big it felt back then.
Passion is Contagious
“The thing with passionate, committed people is these values are highly contagious”. When you observe your peer delivering something exceptional, you too want to try and deliver better and a company that encourages you to take challenges, even if you fail is like a cherry on the cake. I think it is this attitude in the company where we can fail and learn, has taught us to achieve things that you cannot expect a team of 30 to deliver. I feel we are well equipped to deliver competitive products into the market.
Quick Decisions
A lot of organizations take too much time to decide, too many protocols to be followed and approvals to be obtained before taking any call. In SecPod we understand it is better to try implementing a good idea and fail than waiting for years to perfect an idea. It mostly takes us 1 or 2 meetings to make a call and start actively working. We do not believe in talking about ideas forever without getting our hands dirty. I think it is this reason, our product has emerged so beautifully only in a few years after its inception, whether it is a customer issue or a new feature we have always made a call quickly.
Walk up to anyone
When a group of people spend most of their waking hours working together, interacting with each other, differences are bound to occur. We are no different. Each of us bring our own perspective. SecPod believes in an open-door culture where you are encouraged to walk up to the person and communicate your thoughts. If you believe something must be done differently, all you need to do is approach the person and share your opinion. There is no hierarchy. Another key point is gossiping, or rumor mongering is not something we as a company want to indulge in, we want to be able to talk to the person straight away and set things right.
Egoless
When you are writing a code or creating a product it is very natural to attach your ego with the work you have implemented. Many find it difficult to deal with criticism, but here we understand that great work is a team effort. Here, you will see different teams taking feedback from each other, arguing on what works best and then following the one which helps make our products better. One experience that I would want to share is w.r.t writing regular expressions. When we started out creating security content, we did not give much importance to the quality of reg-exes that we were writing. Later when the product team wanted to create a scanner that could scan any system in 5 minutes (another audacious goal), they realized the after effects of these regular expressions and brought it our notice. One of the product team member also explained how we could minimize the time being taken to evaluate a reg-ex. We ended up rewriting a lot of reg-exes. This exercise has improved the quality of our content to a huge extent.
Being Sensitive to Employee Needs
Another beauty with SecPod is the company does not think its employees are machines who will not go through bad times. We are all aware how any change in your personal life impacts your equations at work, but here we understand each of us go through rough patches in life and we believe in letting our peers take their personal time to bounce back. A big difference that I observed in SecPod is, being a mother to a toddler, I have experienced unconditional support from both the team and the management. A very empathetic team and management is also one of the key traits that we carry. I think once you have worked here the company etches such high standards about work life, that it becomes difficult to find this kind of balance anywhere else in the industry.
Besides the regular fun that we have daily, where work is fun, we also make sure we celebrate every milestone, conduct all-hands meetings, have fun events, celebrate birthdays in a unique way. All this sum up to the wonderful experience of being a part of SecPod and the Saner journey we are taking.